Cézanne associated with the Impressionists, but always had other aims. He said that his ambition was to 'make of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of museums'. Cézanne's work was discovered by the Paris avant-garde during the 1890s. It had a significant influence on Picasso and the development of 20th-century art.
Cézanne's boyhood in Provence was dominated by his father, a wealthy banker, and his friend Emile Zola. Under family pressure he trained as a lawyer in his native Aix while attending lessons at the local drawing academy. After moving to Paris he attended a private art school (the Académie Suisse).
Cézanne absorbed many influences, including those of Courbet and Manet, in his early years. In his early works he often imitated Courbet, applying thick layers of paint with a palette knife. He later told Renoir that it took him twenty years to realise that painting was not sculpture. In the 1880s his brushwork became increasingly systematic and ordered. He worked slowly and methodically, selecting subjects he could study for long periods.
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Paul Cézanne
1839 - 1906

Image: Cézanne, Self Portrait, about 1880
Paintings by Paul Cézanne
(Showing 6 of 13 works)

A old women, her gaze unfocused, clutches a rosary – a string of beads used in prayer – tightly in her hands. According to the writer Joachim Gasquet, the sitter was a former nun who had escaped from a convent, wandering aimlessly until Cézanne took her on as a servant.Gasquet found this painting...
Not on display

Cézanne spent several months over the summer of 1888 working in and around Chantilly, some 24 miles north of Paris. This is one of three similar oil paintings of the park surrounding the chateau that he produced during his stay. The symmetry and spatial depth of this view may have appealed to him...

Around 200 of Cézanne’s works depict male and female nude bathers, either singly or in groups, in a landscape. This large painting is one of three pictures of female bathers that Cézanne worked on during the final decade of his life. They represent the culmination of his lifelong investigation of...

The wall of angular, jutting rock formations in this painting may represent a quarry, with the cuttings revealing geological strata. While the hillside is somewhere in Cézanne’s native Provence, the specific location has not been conclusively identified.Stylistically, the painting relates to scen...
Not on display

This painting is of a summer landscape in Cézanne’s native Provence in the south of France. Like the Impressionists, Cézanne was interested in depicting the landscape primarily using touches of colour. Although this painting shows Cézanne’s debt to Impressionism, his method is more controlled. Fo...

Paul Cézanne was about 40 years old when he painted this self portrait in Paris around 1880–1. He was now middle-aged with a family to support, and the intensity of his earlier self portraits has here given way to a more distant and reflective presence. Although relatively small, the portrait has...

The Château Noir was a rambling house situated in extensive grounds near Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. Surrounded by wild vegetation, the run-down, isolated chateau offered Cézanne many subjects, and it became one of his favourite locations. He rented a small room in the house from 1897...
Not on display

An older man sits, legs crossed and head bowed, absorbed in his reading. This is Cézanne’s father, Louis-Auguste. He was probably in his early sixties when his son painted this portrait directly onto an alcove wall in the salon of Jas de Bouffan, the country residence outside Aix-en-Provence that...

During the 1860s Cézanne divided his time between his family home in Aix-en-Provence and Paris, where this picture was probably painted. It evokes the privation of his Bohemian existence in the capital. Cézanne has rearranged the objects in his studio, and we see them from a high viewpoint, as th...
You've viewed 6 of 13 paintings